September 10, 2010|By Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times Art Critic On the wall of my mother's den hang two framed 19th century military rosters. One chronicles the Union troops my great-grandfather, a civilian soldier, led during the Civil War. The other lists the 11 battles he fought in — Malvern Hill, Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Spotsylvania, etc. — from 1862 to 1864. Spotsylvania is where he took a Minié ball to the midsection, a wound that likely would have killed him had it not passed through his leather belt first.
Today his uniform (and the belt) are in a glass case at the Connecticut Valley Historical Museum, just up the street from where he ran a plumbing business. In a small box on my desk I keep a conical, gray-white, three-ring Minié ball that a friend sent from Gettysburg. The bullet is lead, but I'm still always surprised at how heavy it is.
I thought of those rosters, that uniform and the weighty Minié ball when I visited the newly refurbished Oakland Museum of California a few months ago. The madeleine prompting the recollection was a large, seemingly abstract photograph showing scores of concentric circles and pencil-thin arcs of bright light against an ashen ground. The mysterious image, like something concocted by Franz Mesmer to illustrate a spinning Hitchcock vision of vertigo, recalls a cross between a flat target and a deep tunnel.
Titled "Nine Reconnaissance Satellites Over the Sonora Pass," the 2008 photograph is in fact a complex time-lapse work by Oakland artist Trevor Paglen. Sonora Pass is a treacherous High Sierra route south of Carson City, Nev., and north of Yosemite, braved by 19th century Eastern immigrants traveling by wagon to California. Quintessential wilderness, it's the remote spot in which Paglen set up a technically enhanced camera, aimed it at the night sky and recorded a four-hour exposure using only natural light.
In essence, what the camera saw was warfare.
In addition to starlight, the artist captured the light reflected off at least 10 man-made satellites, typically invisible to the casual naked eye, nine of them launched by the United States and Russia as reconnoitering tools during the Cold War. As the Earth turned, concentric circles of reflected light were inscribed by the camera. The swirling picture looks like a target inflected by a sensation of dizziness.
It pulled me up short. Wilderness turns out to be not so remote after all.
It's one thing to see the names of people inscribed on an antique decorated military roster, recognize the scratchy woolen cloth of a soldier's uniform and feel the heft of lead ammunition. It's another to see what Paglen shows us — invisible, untouchable but nonetheless omnipresent conditions of conflict and military action. We are the subject of constant if unseen surveillance from hundreds of miles away, all for wartime purposes that are no doubt still underway.
Visually, "Nine Reconnaissance Satellites Over the Sonora Pass" is a photographic echo of the 1935 "Rotoreliefs" made by Marcel Duchamp. In order to parody faith in human vision as the sole avenue to artistic knowledge, the Dada imp made a dozen spinning disks inscribed with circular patterns that, when rotated by a motor, create optical confusion. Paglen's static photograph does too, but in a decidedly less playful, more sinister way. It's included in "Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes," his fascinating new book from Aperture, and its emphasis on concealment and invisibility as a photographer's best friend is provocative.
Among the series of Paglen works chronicled in "Invisible" is a suite titled "On Ghosts." Selections were included in the traveling exhibition "The New Normal," which visited the Pomona College Museum of Art in Claremont last year.
Grainy black-and-white ink-jet prints show passports and passport pictures used by CIA agents involved in the 2003 kidnapping of an innocent Muslim cleric, Abu Omar, who was taken to two American military bases and transferred to Egypt, where he said he was tortured. (Last year an Italian court convicted 23 Americans in the illegal rendition.) Paglen's prints are found photographs. Through reproduction, they forfeit traditional artistic claims to originality. Questioning identity is certainly a standard trope in postmodern art theory, but it's given fresh life when the subject is brutal covert military action taken against an ordinary civilian.
